But before NR-1 could be built, it had to be paid for, and right now there was little room in the budget for a mini-submarine among the plans for DSRVs and SeaLahs. The problem didn't faze Rickover, and he solved it at a meeting with Craven; Rear Admiral Levering Smith, Raborn's top deputy on Polaris; and Robert Morse, the assistant secretary of the Navy for research and development.
"You have any money we can get started with right now?" Rickover asked. Craven answered that his deep-submergence group could spare $10 million of its research and development money. Smith noted that the Polaris program had about $10 million of unused ship construction funds.
"How much is this submarine going to cost?" Morse asked.
Without hesitation, Rickover answered: $20 million. Morse went on to outline the tortuous process by which ships are normally built: contract definition, bidding, congressional approvals. Rickover cut him off before he could finish. "Just leave all that to me." Then Rickover turned to Craven and directed, "You call up Electric Boat tomorrow and tell them to get started."
Craven, Smith, and Morse exchanged looks of disbelief. Nobody believed this could be done for $20 million-the budget soon grew to $30 million. They also saw no way that Congress was going to stand for this. Less than a week later, Rickover called Craven and told him that the president was going to announce that afternoon that NR-1 was going to be built.
Upon hearing the news, Morse moved quickly from a state of shock into a state of panic. Up until that moment, NR-1 had been little more than an admiral's fantasy; indeed, Rickover had given only sketchy accounts of his plan to Paul H. Nitze, the secretary of the Navy, and Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of Defense. Though both had approved it, Morse knew Congress was not going to like hearing about a major project this way. As soon as the president announced the NR-1, the House Committee on Appropriations hastily called a hearing.
Craven, on Rickover's orders, had just a few days to come up with an official mission statement, a full-bore cost-benefit analysis, and a detailed study as to why the Navy needed the mini-sub.
"Well, you know, Admiral, that study really doesn't exist," Craven answered.
"It will exist by the time the hearing takes place," Rickover barked back.
Now the existence of NR-1, and perhaps his own career, rested on Craven's ability to spin visions from a black hole. He needed to prove that NR-1 was a crucial investment, one worth $30 million.
The appropriations committee wasn't fooled, but in the end it had no choice but to give in. NR-1 was now a presidential directive. No other submarine or ship had ever been authorized faster, or ever would he again. Later, the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, scrutinized the project and concluded that it was one of the worst managed programs its investigators had ever seen.
Rickover answered in typical form, firing off a letter to his critics that so amazed Craven that he committed it to memory. "I read the GAO report, and it reminds me of a review I read of Lady Chatterley's Lover in the magazine Field and Stream. The reviewer of that book knew as much about the real purpose of Lady Chatterley's Lover as the GAO knows about the design and development of submarines."
Rickover was no gentler on Craven. The admiral was infuriated that he had to share Craven with the Halibut refit, the DSRV program, and the other deep-ocean projects. As far as Rickover was concerned, none of those was more important than his NR-1.
Making the admiral even angrier was the fact that he was not cleared for the details about Halibut's new mission. Little went on within the submarine force that he didn't know something about, but the intelligence programs were one of the few areas in which he had no official "in," no real say. He took out his frustrations on Craven, who began to imagine that the admiral was waiting up nights before calling, waiting until Craven fell into a deep slumber or thought about romancing his wife. He was almost convinced that his time submerged conducting tests on Halibut was being monitored by Rickover, who seemed to time his calls for moments when it was impossible for Craven to answer. Craven always paid dearly for being unavailable.
One Friday, Rickover was giving a speech in New York City and he sent word to Halibut, which was out near Hawaii, demanding that Craven meet him in New York first thing Monday morning.
Craven hopped a plane, suffered a moment of panic when the flight got socked in by fog during a layover in Los Angeles, and finally landed in New York and raced breathless to Rickover's hotel suite, where the admiral was waiting. "You were out there playing golf with the beach boys," he said, mocking the cover story Craven had crafted for his trip to Hawaii.
He then turned to the house phone. "Bring this man the biggest lunch in the hotel." Craven waited for the punch line: he knew the admiral wasn't worried that he might he hungry after the long trip.
Sure enough: "For the next hour, you are going to sit and eat lunch," Rickover announced. "And I am going to bawl you out."
Appearances to the contrary, Rickover liked Craven almost as much as he liked making him miserable. Rickover was impressed that Craven had moxie enough to withstand his worst tantrums. The admiral also loved that Craven had never attended the Naval Academy. Rickover had been a loner as a midshipman, and now he made great sport of adding a little torture to the mix when he interviewed Naval Academy graduates for his nuclear program. Those entrance interviews had become more like initiation rites, in which the admiral took young men to the psychological brink in his quest for perfection. Trying to rattle his applicants, Rickover would spout obscenities, seat them in chairs with one leg cut short, or send them off to "Siberia," a storage closet where they would be left for hours.
Perhaps the all-time Rickover classic occurred when he squared off against a candidate and said, "Piss me off, if you can." The young man answered without hesitation and without a word. He lifted his arm and with one motion swept Rickover's desk clean of books, papers, pens, everything. The candidate was accepted.
For Rickover, torturing Craven was a mere sideline.
Craven, meanwhile, was increasingly on call as the Navy's resident deep-ocean expert. But there was one call that stood out from all the rest. It came on a Saturday morning in January 1966.
"This is Jack Howard," said an assistant secretary of Defense in charge of nuclear matters. "I've lost an H-bomb."
"Why are you calling me?" Craven asked.
"This one I've lost in the water, and I want you to find it." Craven was being assigned to work with a team hastily assembled by an admiral in the Pentagon. Another group was going to the site.
A B-52 bomber had collided with an air tanker during a refueling operation 30,000 feet in the air off the coast of Palomares, Spain, losing its atomic payload. Three of four bombs were recovered almost immediately. But a fourth was lost and had presumably fallen to the bottom of the Mediterranean. President Lyndon Johnson knew the Soviets were looking for the bomb, and he refused to believe the Navy's assurances that there was a good probability that it would never be recovered by either side. Indeed, that was the belief of most of the people assigned to find the bomb-but not Craven.
Craven called in a group of mathematicians and set them to work constructing a map of the sea bottom outside Palomares. That sounded reasonable enough, but Craven intended to use that map for an analysis that seemed more reminiscent of racetrack betting than of anything ever put down in a Navy search and salvage manual.